Working at Home on the Internet

Broken Link Checker Plugin for WordPress

A MUST HAVE if you run a Blog Carnival (or just link a lot)

 As most of you already know, I run the Working at Home Blog Carnival every week. Actually, it’s coming up on the 100th Edition in two weeks.

Now, even with weeding out all the Spam submissions and unrelated articles, I still end up with somewhere between 20-30 participants each and every week. Each of those blogs (sometimes websites) have at least two links associated with their submission.

20-30 x 2 x 100 = 4,000-6,000 links.

That’s A LOT of LINKS

That doesn’t even include the Weekly Helpful Reads, Blog Tipping posts or reference links I put within individual posts. At last count, I was well over 12,000 links over three years of Blogging. Not all of which continue to be viable due to a multitude of reasons, ie. the blog was moved, they changed their URL configuration, they just deleted the post or just closed shop. Any number of reasons can cause a link to go bad.

The point is, if you run a Blog Carnival or just link out a lot to your friends and associates, you will eventually end up with some (or a lot) of broken links. If you are just starting out, you can do as I did in the beginning, just check them one at a time. That’s all well and good until you start to run into the hundreds and then thousands of links. You don’t want your readers clicking a bad link because you recommended a site and they get an error on that page because it is no longer there. That is not a good thing.

For the past year or so, I have been depending on Xenu, a link checker that is quite good. As a matter of fact, it is one of the main reasons I have been able to keep up with the myriad of bad links that have plagued me since starting the Blog Carnival. Even though it is downloadable to a desktop and easy to use, it becomes quite cumbersome when you start hitting the number of links with which I have had to deal.

I have been able to keep the broken link problem to a minimum using that program, but I still have to remember to run it, have a different Tab open while being logged into my Blog and accessing each link individually, unlinking them manually and saving the original post. Lots of steps for something that should  be nice and simple.

Luckily for me, I found the Broken Link Checker Plugin written by Janis Elsts. (I wish I remembered where I first saw a reference to this plugin, I would have put a link to them without a doubt.)

It is an easy to install WordPress Plugin, standard installation, simple to use. It will probably take a little time to run the first time if you have never checked for bad links before, but after you have a handle on the broken link problem, this plugin will be there for you whenever a link goes bad.

My Recommendation ***** Stars

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August 19th, 2008 at 06:34pm | Posted by Joe | Carnivals, Linking, Plug-ins | 4 reader remarks | Print This Post